“Very generous, I’m sure,” Mo would probably have whispered. “Food and drink from their own fields, won by the labor of their own hands.” Mo did not particularly like castles. But that was the way of Fenoglio’s world: The land on which the peasants toiled belonged to the Laughing Prince who was now the Prince of Sighs, so a large part of the harvest was his, too, and he dressed in silk and velvet, while his peasants wore much-mended smocks that scratched the skin.
Despina had wound her thin arms around Fenoglio’s neck when they passed the guards at the gate, but at the sight of the first entertainers she quickly slipped off his back. One of them had stretched his rope between the battlements, and was walking high up there in the air, moving more lightly than a spider on its silver thread. His clothes were blue as the sky above him, for blue was the color of the tightrope-walkers; Meggie’s mother had told her that, too. If only Resa had been here! The Motley Folk were everywhere among the stalls: pipers and jugglers, knife-throwers, strong men, animal-tamers, contortionists, actors, clowns. Right in front of the wall Meggie saw a fire-eater, yes, black and red was their costume, and for a moment she thought it was Dustfinger, but when the man turned he was a stranger with an unscarred face, and the smile with which he bowed to the people around him was not at all like Dustfinger’s.
But he must be here, if he’s really back, thought Meggie, as she looked around for him. Why did she feel so disappointed? As if she didn’t know. It was Farid she really missed. And if Dustfinger wasn’t here, she supposed it would be no use looking for Farid, either.
“Come along, Meggie!” Despina pronounced her name as if it was going to take her tongue some time to get used to it. She pulled Meggie over to a stall selling sweet cakes dripping with honey.
Even today those cakes had to be paid for. The trader selling them was keeping a close eye on his wares, but luckily Fenoglio had a few coins on him. Despina’s thin fingers were sticky when she put them into Meggie’s hand again. She looked around, wide-eyed, and kept stopping, but Fenoglio impatiently waved them on, past a wooden platform decked with flowers and evergreen branches, rising above the stalls. The black banners flying from the castle battlements and towers overhead hung here as well, to the right and left of three thrones on the platform.
The backs of the seats were embroidered with the emblem of the weeping lion.
“Why three thrones, I ask myself?” Fenoglio whispered to Meggie as he urged her and the children on. “The Prince of Sighs himself won’t be showing his face, anyway. Come along, we’re late already.” With a firm step, he turned his back on the busy scene in the Outer Courtyard and made his way to the Inner Ring of the castle walls. The gate toward which he was moving was not quite as tall as the one in the Outer Ring, but it, too, looked forbidding, and so did the guards who crossed their spears as Fenoglio approached them. “As if they didn’t know me!” he whispered crossly to Meggie. “But we have to play the same game every time.
Tell the prince that Fenoglio the poet is here!” he said, raising his voice, as the two children pressed close to him and stared at the spears as if looking for dried blood on their points.
“Is the prince expecting you?” The guard who spoke seemed to still be very young, judging by what could be seen of his face under his helmet.
“Of course he is!” snapped Fenoglio. “And if he has to wait any longer I’ll blame it on you, Anselmo. What’s more, if you want me to write you a few fine-sounding words, as you did last month” – here the guard cast a nervous glance at his fellow sentry, but the latter pretended not to have heard and looked up at the tightrope-walker – “then,” Fenoglio concluded, lowering his voice, “I shall keep you waiting in your own turn. I’m an old man, and God knows I have better things to do than cool my heels here in front of your spear.”
All that could be seen of Anselmo’s face turned as red as the sour wine that Fenoglio had drunk beside the strolling players’ fire. However, he did not move his spear aside. “The fact is, Inkweaver, we have visitors,” he said in an undertone.
“Visitors? What are you talking about?”
But Anselmo wasn’t looking at Fenoglio anymore.
The gate behind him opened, creaking, as if its own weight were too heavy for it. Meggie drew Despina aside; Fenoglio took Ivo’s hand. Soldiers rode into the Outer Courtyard, armed horsemen, their cloaks silvery gray, like the greaves they wore on their legs, and the emblem on their breasts was not the Laughing Prince’s. It showed a viper’s slender body rearing up in search of prey, and Meggie recognized it at once. This was the Adderhead’s coat of arms.
Nothing moved in the Outer Courtyard now. All was silent as the grave. The entertainers, even the blue-clad tightrope-walker high above on his rope, were all forgotten. Resa had told Meggie exactly what the Adderhead’s emblem looked like; she had seen it often enough at close quarters. Envoys from the Castle of Night had been welcome guests in Capricorn’s fortress. Many of the farms set on fire by Capricorn’s men, so rumor said at the time, had been burned down on the Adderhead’s orders.
Meggie held Despina close as the men-at-arms rode by them.
Their breastplates glinted in the sun. It looked as if not even a bolt from a crossbow could pierce that armor, let alone a poor man’s arrow. Two men rode at their head: one was a redhead, in armor like the soldiers following him but resplendent in a cloak of foxtails, while the other was wearing a green robe shot with silver that was fine enough for any prince. However, what everyone noticed about him first was not that robe but his nose; unlike ordinary noses of flesh and blood, it was made of silver.
“Look at that couple! What a team!” Fenoglio whispered to Meggie, as the two men rode side by side through the silent crowd. “Both of them my creations, and both once Capricorn’s men. Your mother may have told you about them. Firefox was Capricorn’s deputy, the Piper was his minstrel. But the silver nose wasn’t my idea. Nor the fact that they escaped Cosimo’s soldiers when he attacked Capricorn’s fortress and now serve the Adderhead.”
It was still eerily silent in the courtyard. There was no sound but the clatter of hooves, the snorting horses, the clank of armor, weapons, and spears – curiously loud, as if the sounds were caught between the high walls like birds.
The Adderhead himself was one of the last to ride in. There was no mistaking him. “He looks like a butcher,” Resa had said. “A butcher in princely clothes, with his love of killing written all over his coarse face.” The horse he rode was white, heavily built like its master, and almost entirely hidden by a caparison patterned with the snake emblem. The Adderhead himself wore a black robe embroidered with silver flowers. His skin was tanned by the sun, his sparse hair was gray, his mouth curiously small a lipless slit in his coarse, clean-shaven face. Everything about him seemed heavy and fleshy: his arms and legs, his thick neck, his broad nose. Unlike those richer subjects of the Laughing Prince who were now standing in the courtyard, he wore no jewelry, no heavy chains around his neck, no rings set with precious stones on his fat fingers.
But gems sparkled in the corners of his nostrils, red as drops of blood, and on the middle finger of his left hand, over his glove, he wore the silver ring he used for sealing death warrants. His eyes, narrow under lids folded like a salamander’s, darted restlessly around the courtyard. They seemed to linger for a split second, like a lizard’s sticky tongue, on everything they saw: the strolling players, the tightrope-walker overhead, the rich merchants waiting beside the empty, flower-decked platform, submissively bowing their heads when his glance rested on them.
